Shall I double and take refuge in a labyrinth of subterfuge or turn and fight?  So I temporized to-day.

“It is lonely—­but not quite ‘torture’ to me, with the family so close, across the street,” I answered him, and I went on whipping the lace on a piece of fluff I am making, to discipline myself because I loathe a needle so.  “Please don’t you worry over me, dear.”  I raised my eyes to his and I tried the common citizenship look.  It must have carried a little way for he flushed, the first time I ever saw him do it, and his hand with the cigarette in it shook.

“Evelina, are you real or a—­farce?” he asked, after a few minutes of peace.

“I’m trying to be real, Polk,” I answered, and this time I raised my eyes with perfect frankness.  “If you could define a real woman, Polk, in what terms would you express her?” I asked him straight out from the shoulder.

“Hell fire and a hallelujah chorus, if she’s beautiful,” he answered me promptly.

I laughed.  I thought it was best under the circumstances.

“I’ll tell you, Evelina,” he continued, stealthily.  “A man just can’t generalize the creatures.  Apparently they are craving nothing so much as emotional excitement and when you offer it to them they want to go to housekeeping with it.  Love is a business with them and not an art.”

“Would you like to try a genuine friendship with one.  Polk?” I asked, and again struck from the shoulder—­with my eyes.

“Help!  Not if you mean yourself, beautiful,” he answered promptly and with fervor.  “I wouldn’t trust myself with you one minute off-guard like that.”

“You could safely.”

“But I won’t!”

“Will you try?”

“No!”

“Will you go over and sit in that chair while I tell you something calmly, quietly, and seriously?  It’ll give you a new sensation and maybe it will be good for you.”  I looked him straight in the face and the battle of our eyes was something terrific.  I had made up my mind to have it out with him then and there.  There was nothing else to do.  I would be frank and courageous and true to my vow—­and accept the consequences.

He slid along the railing of the porch and down into the chair in almost a daze of bewilderment.

“Polk,” I began, concealing a gulp of terror, “I love you more than I can possibly—­”

[Illustration:  “Say, Polk, I let the Pup git hung by her apron to the wheel of your car.”]

“Say, Polk, I let the Pup git hung by her apron to the wheel of your car out in the road and her head is dangersome kinder upside down.  It might run away.  Can you come and git her loose for me?”

Henrietta’s calmness under dire circumstances was a lesson to both Polk and me, for with two gasps that sounded as one we both raced across the porch, down the path and out to the road where Folk’s Hupp runabout stood by the worn old stone post that had tethered the horses of the wooers of many generations of the maids of my house.